As campaign season nears, politicians are turning up the volume on campaign rhetoric. To cut through the noise, we’re launching Campaign Context, a weekly series providing clarity on the messages you’re hearing from candidates on the campaign trail. We’re digging past the politics and into the facts to provide you with the transparent, spin-free information you need to make informed decisions this election season.

AUSTIN (KXAN) — The Biden Administration recently announced it waived federal laws to allow border wall construction to resume on the Texas-Mexico border.

The president argued his hand was forced to make the move because Congress approved the money for wall construction during the Trump Administration.

“I tried to [members of Congress] to reappropriate, to redirect that money,” Biden told reporters earlier this month. “They didn’t, they wouldn’t.”

KXAN scanned through documents released by the White House Press Briefing Room and found a proclamation from January 2021, just as Biden assumed office.

In it, the president called for an immediate “pause in construction and obligation of funds,” for the wall and called for a plan to be developed “within 60 days” to terminate or repurpose “contracts with private contractors engaged in wall construction, while providing for the expenditure of any funds that the Congress expressly appropriated for wall construction.”

Five months later, in June 2021, the administration once again “reiterated its call for Congress to cancel funds.”

The White House has pushed back on claims that the resumption of wall construction is the result of political pressure following the recent surge in migrants arriving at the southern border.